Related papers: Surfing on turbulence: a strategy for planktonic n…
The properties of biological microswimmers are to a large extent determined by fluid-mediated interactions, which govern their propulsion, perception of their surrounding, and the steering of their motion for feeding or in pursuit.…
Microswimming cells and robots exhibit diverse behaviours due to both their swimming and their environment. One of the core environmental features impacting inertialess swimming is background flows. While the influence of select flows,…
Small objects can swim by generating around them fields or gradients which in turn induce fluid motion past their surface by phoretic surface effects. We quantify for arbitrary swimmer shapes and surface patterns, how efficient swimming…
Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…
In a fluid environment, flagellated microswimmers propel themselves by rotating their flagella. The morphology of these flagella significantly influences forward speed, swimming efficiency, and directional stability, which are critical for…
Using waves to explore our environment is a widely used paradigm, ranging from seismology to radar technology, and from bio-medical imaging to precision measurements. In all of these fields, the central aim is to gather as much information…
Turbulence is one of the most fascinating phenomena in nature and one of the biggest challenges for modern physics. It is common knowledge that a flow of a simple, Newtonian fluid is likely to be turbulent, when velocity is high, viscosity…
The connection between turbulence and solar-wind acceleration, long known in space physics, is further developed in this Letter by establishing a robust empirical law that relates the bulk-flow speed to the magnetohydrodynamic-scale…
Sand is a highly dissipative system, where the local spatial arrangements and densities depend strongly on the applied forces, resulting in fluid-like or solid-like behaviour. This makes sand swimming challenging and intriguing, raising…
Birds rely on active high-acceleration morphing and flapping to navigate complex airflows, but they can also maintain stable fixed-wing postures under persistent atmospheric disturbances. Here, we show that avian wings exhibit aerodynamic…
Understanding the dynamics of material objects advected by turbulent flows is a long standing question in fluid dynamics. In this perspective article we focus on the characterization of the statistical properties of non-interacting…
While many organisms filter feed and exchange heat or nutrients in flow, few benthic organisms also actively pulse to enhance feeding and exchange. One example is the pulsing soft coral (Heteroxenia fuscescens). Pulsing corals live in…
Movement is a fundamental behaviour of organisms that brings about beneficial encounters with resources and mates, but at the same time exposes the organism to dangerous encounters with predators. The movement patterns adopted by organisms…
The majority of practical flows, particularly those flows in applications of importance to transport, distribution and climate, are turbulent and as a result experience complex three-dimensional motion with increased drag compared with the…
Self-propelled microparticles create flow fields that determine how they interact with surfaces, external flows, and each other. These flow fields fall into distinct classes--pushers, pullers, and neutral swimmers--each exhibiting…
Based on machine learning techniques, we propose a novel method to estimate flow fields using only floating sensor locations. This method does not require either ground-truth velocity fields or governing equations for fluid flows, which is…
Fishes, cetaceans, and many other aquatic vertebrates undulate their bodies to propel themselves through water. Swimming requires an intricate interplay between sensing the environment, making decisions, controlling internal dynamics, and…
There is a clear distinction between simple laminar and complex turbulent fluids. But in some cases, as for the nocturnal planetary boundary layer, a stable and well-ordered flow can develop intense and sporadic bursts of turbulent activity…
The random energy landscapes developed by speckle fields can be used to confine and manipulate a large number of micro-particles with a single laser beam. By means of molecular dynamics simulations, we investigate the static and dynamic…
Roles of turbulence in the context of magnetic reconnection are investigated with special emphasis on the mutual interaction between flow (large-scale inhomogeneous structure) and turbulence. In order to evaluate the effective transport due…